Labor Day

Lets talk about jobs. The President plans on unveiling his plan on Wednesday. He says he will be focused on infrastructure and roads. They want to put one million people back to work in construction. In Detroit the Mayor is planning of giving houses to police officers. At the same time Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are afraid to drop almost a half a million houses on the market because it will further deflate prices.

By the way, I feel much better today. Back to jobs. As I had told people, the stimulus failed, it was intended to fail. The jobs had to be shovel ready which meant that projects that were designed; but, were not funded (because they weren't good projects) were what was used. Most of the work was contracted out which meant that no permanent or long term jobs were created. Finally, lots of profit for private companies meant low paying, temp jobs. The worst part was that the infrastructure that needed repairs was not addressed much. We need to repair what we have more than make more infrastructure.

The biggest problem we are facing is not jobs and it is not housing, it is the lack of cooperation. We have to want to make things work again, we have to think about all of us rather than just ourselves. We need jobs that will bring us together, a sense of community, a sense that we are all in this together.

We need to have a top down fix. That means putting people in charge who actually care about the work and the workers. We also need workers to think that they are part of a team. How would you organize people to achieve these goals. We need new heroes, not the lazy and privileged, people who actually work for the common goal.

Millions of people have had two years off, two years without work, are they ready to go back to work? What about taking pride in the work we do, are people ready to do that again?